The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  Once he mastered his spasming limbs, Hieronymus couldn’t help but laugh at his acute state of misery. “I must say,” he spluttered, addressing the darkness, “the pain is exquisite. Makes me glad I shaved my chin whiskers this morning.”

  “Pain? What would you know of pain?” boomed a voice in reply, deep and haughty.

  The room exploded into light and Hieronymus flinched, cueing another round of excruciating convulsions. As he flailed, he heard the plinking of steel gears and the ragged hum of a mechanical contrivance as the threads pulled his body into a vertical position. Hieronymus blinked away stars of pain to discover that he hung a few feet above a stone floor in a floodlit cavernous room. A giant of a man stood before him, adorned in rich velvet robes with gold piping that flowed around him. His prominent Roman nose and lidless, hawkish eyes – obviously the handiwork of one of the city’s top physiognomers – suggested he belonged to the city’s aristocracy. His mouth twisted in derision.

  “At present, I know quite a bit about pain, thank you,” Hieronymus said.

  The man smiled and gestured behind him to a hulking construct of gears, belts and pulleys. At the top was a flared brass cylinder where the milky white threads emerged and curved upward to the ceiling. The contraption clicked and clacked as it made minute adjustments in tension.

  “I’m glad you appreciate quality craftsmanship. The spirit of the Inquisition married to German ingenuity.”

  “Diabolical,” Hieronymus admitted, fighting to remain conscious.

  The room echoed with his laughter, but when he spoke it was with pure scorn. “Hieronymus Dismas, Grandmaster Thief of People’s Granada. I’d heard that you were clever. It took a small fortune to sniff you out but, happily for me, I have a large fortune. Fail me though and you shall regret it.”

  “Fail you?” Hieronymus asked, perplexed as he struggled to remain focused. Someone had betrayed him. Who? It must have been a brother whom he had trusted with his life as no one else knew him by that name. It was a black thought. He since the moment of his capture he had expected a lengthy torture and execution as payback for one of the many crimes he’d committed as a foot soldier. Yet now it seemed as though this aristocrat was to lay some task before him? His mind raced. Perhaps he had burgled some priceless family heirloom.

  “Do you need my help recovering an item you might have – misplaced?”

  The aristocrat snorted. “Property? If it were that easy I could employ any common thief. I need a man who has the guile to steal the horns from a bull, a burglar who can infiltrate the most ironclad fortress. I need a thief of legendary status for this work.”

  Despite a sudden surge of pride, Hieronymus’s will hardened. Through his teeth he muttered, “You mistake me, sir. For your kind, I am not for sale.”

  The man smirked. “Fine. If you don’t agree to help me, I’ll firebomb the Fin del Mundo. During the midnight hour, of course, when the rabble packs in shoulder to shoulder to stuff their sweating faces with cheap food. And then I’ll bomb the next door down, and the next. I will raze every sleazy hideout in the old town until you bend your will to mine. You shall not refuse me, for I am Don Rodrigo Álvarez de Montefrio.”

  Neither the name nor title fazed Hieronymus, as he recognized neither. After the war the city had spawned minor lords like a kitchens did cockroaches, far too many to keep track of, though the tabloids tried their best.

  “Surely you’re joking, Don Rodrigo. The city’s wounds are still raw and weeping. Such an attack would cause a riot. Whole neighborhoods would burn.”

  Hieronymus let the thought trail off. His comrades had surrendered because they were exhausted, outnumbered, and outgunned. Six years on and none of that had changed. Any uprising would be utterly crushed beneath a steel-shod heel.

  Don Rodrigo shrugged. “Not my neighborhood. Remember thief, your betters dwell in towers high above the city. Whatever stink your kind dredges up blows away on the wind before it reaches our thresholds. When the unrest ends, things will return to what they were before, but with fewer of you rabble roaming about. And you, with all that blood on your hands.”

  His captor chuckled as he watched Hieronymus’s expression change.

  “Ah, so the stories are true then. You love the common man. A terrible affliction, love, isn’t it? The way it holds one captive? The way it raises your hopes, only to dash them on the ground. And there is no greater pain than being forsaken by one you love.”

  Hieronymus remained silent.

  However when Don Rodrigo spoke again, it was his cheeks that were wet, and all traces of his arrogance trickled away with his tears. He presented an altogether smaller man. He spoke in a voice quiet and measured.

  “My lover has severed ties with me. Her parents wish to improve their family’s station by marrying her away to a duke, not some provincial lordling like me. My Dolores prays that I will drop my courtship if she rejects my correspondence, but I am made of sterner stuff. I shall pursue her until the end of my days if needs be. Our kind of love only occurs once in a lifetime. She will be mine, whatever the cost.”

  Don Rodrigo dried his face with his sleeve and retreated to the machine. A high-pitched whine filled the room and Hieronymus felt the threads suspending him go slack and he was falling. His feet stung and pain shot through his limbs as he clattered to the cold stone floor, covered by the fine threads. He struggled to a kneeling position, tearing handfuls of threads from his body. His skin was aflame. Don Rodrigo stood before him, brandishing a yellow envelope below his nose.

  “Dolores has instructed her people to refuse my correspondence. You must see that she receives this letter. Secrecy is of the utmost importance. People talk, and the aristocracy cannot be seen consorting with the lower classes,” he said, looking the naked man up and down.

  The thief did not reach for the envelope.

  “Come now, Hieronymus. Think of the cretins.”

  Grudgingly, he opened his hands.

  Hieronymus was seized, clothed, hooded, frog-marched, bundled into a vehicle and strapped to a seat. Tires squealed, the stink of burning rubber filled his nose, and his head rapped smartly against glass after a wicked left turn, and then another. Time stood still beneath the suffocating hood as the vehicle executed a bewildering series of turns. Then there was a long, fishtailing stop. The vehicle doors opened and he felt hands under his raw armpits. Then he was weightless until he felt the bite of concrete on his knees and the kiss of brick on his cheek. Dazed, he peeled off his black silk hood in time to see brake lights disappearing around the corner of an alley.

  Don Rodrigo’s goons had dropped him in an alley on the south-eastern side of the crowded Albaicín, the ancient Moorish quarter packed with shops, restaurants and tavernas. He heard the gurgle of the River Darro beside the Sacromonte, the steeply sloped hill of caves where the city’s gypsies had made their homes for hundreds of years. In the distance, dozens of newly built towers punctuated Granada’s skyline, standing like paranoid sentries against the Andalusian night.

  From across the river, he could hear the faint caterwauling and stamping feet of flamenco. Despite his aching body, Hieronymus managed a smile as he recognized a few voices of his good gypsy friends. Deep in the old town where the aristocrats would never deign to go, they sang with an unnerving sorrow that soaked into the stone walkways, was absorbed by the river and carried out to the sea. For a moment, Hieronymus felt his heartstrings pulled in the direction of the voices. Perhaps he could simply forget about the humiliation he’d endured and enjoy a night of drink and dance.

  Then he remembered Don Rodrigo’s threat. Too easily he imagined orange fire exploding from the windows, the cries of the wounded mingled with the screaming of horses running in circles as their guts leaked out, shadows dancing to the staccato rhythm of gunfire, and weeping children clutching at the sacks of meat and bone that had once been their parents. And he shuddered. These same neighborhoods had been bombed mercilessly at the start of the war and he could not bear to see it
happen again. Yet somewhere in the night’s bustling sea of so-called friends was a traitor, the one who has sold his exact whereabouts to the Don. Sobered by the thought, Hieronymus withdrew the envelope he’d been given. Written in a looping pen was:

  Doña Dolores Josefa y Téllez-Girón de la Soledad 47th floor, Torre de Castidad

  Hieronymus looked into the night sky, the ghostly shapes of zeppelins sliding between clouds, their searchlights glowing in the misty gloom rolling down from the mountains. He did not know offhand which was Torre de Castidad, but he knew the manicured neighborhoods of the wealthy almost as well as the mazy back alleys of the Albaicín, and it would not take him long to locate the duchess’s tower.

  With a wistful glance at the music, Hieronymus turned and slipped into the folds of the night.

  Torre de Castidad was an octagonal tower over sixty floors high, an affront to the eye and lacking any aesthetic quality whatsoever. Hieronymus found it was also slick with rain and devoid of good handholds as he ascended. He counted floors by the balconies he passed, keeping a steady pace and pausing only to blot the sweat from his forehead. Evading the airships lazily trolling spotlights was simple enough, but on the lower levels he faced cascading tripwires strung from every balcony. Springing one would mean certain death. He pushed the thought away and concentrated on finding grooves for his seeking fingers.

  After an eternity of climbing, Hieronymus reached the forty-seventh floor. He wrapped his fingers around the balcony supports and, mustering strength in his exhausted arms, he pulled himself over the safety rail as noiselessly as a cat. In the moonlight, the snowcapped Sierra Madres appeared to float on the sea of fog that had settled over the valley. Granada lay beneath the white blanket, its billowy smoothness perforated by dozens of towers, the sounds of the city’s nightlife lost to his ears.

  Hieronymus dipped his hand into one of his coat’s myriad pockets and withdrew his lock pick set. The beveled glass patio door featured an imposing brass deadbolt of German design. Hieronymus drew a deep breath and knew picking such a lock would take patience; no doubt it would have small gaps to exploit, and the pins would set so delicately they could easily escape his notice. Then there was the question of an irregular tumbler shape . . .

  He hadn’t yet touched the lock with the tool when he heard a click and the whirring of gears as the glass door glided open.

  Heavy purple curtains framing the door billowed inward with the breeze.

  “Señor Dismas, I presume,” an icy female voice said from inside the apartment. “You’re late. We’ve been expecting you.”

  Stout hands lurched at him through the curtains. Hieronymus leapt for the railing but not fast enough. He felt a fist close on his hood, and his head jerked back as a purple mountain fell on top of him. Blows rained down like bombs.

  Hieronymus swam upward into light, the ether of his unconsciousness thick and sour. He had a pounding headache and his mouth tasted of copper and cotton. A medicinal tang stung his nose and the dull ache he felt in his chest was offset by the pain in his arms, which were pinned behind his back by two brass gendarmes, stiff and lifeless as statues. The cold mosaic floor on his bare feet was the least of his discomfort. He shivered from a terrible chill at the core of his body. It was as though he’d been packed in ice and left in the rain.

  His eyes focused on a hand-carved four-poster bed with a ruby red comforter and carefully arranged gold-tasseled pillows. Staring back at him with sparkling jade eyes was a clockwork ocelot, its inner workings an audible buzz as its orange and brown spotted tail thumped listlessly against the pillows. Against one wall stood a drab armoire and on the other a vanity table with enough mirrors and accoutrements that it would have dwarfed the counters of most fashion salons. Two miniature golden trees stood on the vanity, jewels hanging from their fine limbs like exquisite ornaments, each tree topped with a diamond the size of an acorn. Nightstands flanked the bed. On one stood an ornate cage with a gilded thrush inside that preened in unnerving jerks, stopping every few seconds to raise its head and reset. On the other table rested a second birdcage covered by a crimson cloth.

  Hieronymus’s visual reconnaissance was cut short by the clap of heels on the stone floor. A tall, slender woman in a sweeping crimson nightgown entered the room, planting her hands on her hips; her glittering golden fingernails looked as sharp as talons. Bleached white hair stood stacked atop her head, tightly woven like intestines. Her thin features were strikingly beautiful.

  “Doña Dolores, I presume,” Hieronymus croaked.

  She offered a demeaning smile. With false cordiality she said, “Welcome to my home, Señor Dismas. And to whatever do I owe your intrusion? Not a robbery I hope?”

  When the thief said nothing, Dolores sashayed to her vanity, opened a drawer, and withdrew two envelopes.

  “You’re probably wondering how I captured you so easily. Don’t fret, your pathetic skills aren’t in question. I bribed the servants in Rodrigo’s employ to keep me apprised of his plans, so I knew exactly when you would be coming. I’ve already relieved you of your message and read Rodrigo’s romantic twaddle. He should have thought about that before he treated me like a serving girl before his friends.” As she said this, she touched the yellow envelope to the candle and watched it catch fire, then brandished the second. “And you shall return my response.”

  “With all respect, Doña Dolores, I came here as a one-time favor to Don Rodrigo. I must politely decline your request.” A sudden chill racked his body. His arms and legs felt leaden and it took an effort to hold his head up. Again, he wondered about the identity of the spineless, traitorous scum who had brought him to this misery. Hieronymus vowed to make him suffer, should he himself survive this ordeal.

  “You may wish to rethink your answer – and your tone.”

  With a flourish, Dolores whisked the crimson cover from the birdcage on the nightstand. It was no birdcage but rather a large glass vat filled with bright bluish liquid. Suspended at the center, shot through with wires, was a beating human heart.

  She rushed forward and tore open his shirt. He didn’t need to see the six-inch zipper embedded in his chest to know what had happened. Dolores’s silvery laughter echoed through the bedroom, piercing his ears like ice. She grinned and moistened her lips and, in that moment, with her face so close to his, she looked radiant. Hieronymus fully understood Rodrigo’s attraction.

  Her lips touched his ear, sending a thrill down his spine. “You’re mine now, little thief,” she whispered.

  Hieronymus felt his chest seize and he gasped for breath. He belched a mouthful of thick, black smoke, stinking of a thousand cigarettes. Through his open mouth he could hear the wheezing of a tiny working engine, and he could feel the vibrations in his sternum up through his throat. Dolores’s expression soiled as she waved away the stench.

  “Uncouth creature,” she muttered.

  “My heart,” he managed to say, his voice hollow.

  “I collect them. Didn’t Rodrigo tell you?” She gestured to the guards, who instantly sprang to life and wheeled Hieronymus around, forcing him through the open patio doors. While he had been unconscious the fog had lifted, revealing a glittering golden city beneath a sea of stars. The coming dawn was a pink line tracing the horizon. A bracing breeze roused him to his senses as the twin gendarmes lifted him off his feet.

  “What a grand morning,” Dolores said, beaming as she stepped onto the patio and breathed the crisp air. She tapped the second envelope on her palm. “I hope when Rodrigo finds you it will put an end to this foolishness.”

  An acrid burst of smoke jetted from Hieronymus’s nostrils and he spluttered. “You don’t need to do this, Doña Dolores,” he said weakly, struggling against the vicelike grip of the guards as they hefted his feet onto the railing. This will end nothing. Rodrigo promised to pursue you until you are his. He swore this to me. He vowed to continue for the rest of his days.”

  Beneath this feet, eternity spread out before him.

 
His statement was met with silence, and when Hieronymus craned his head back he thought that Dolores was laughing. Only a moment later realized she was weeping behind her fist. She stood silently contemplating the city and the gently glowing traces of its labyrinthine streets, full of secrets, her eyes shining. The moon still hung low and full over the mountains.

  “Oh Ruy,” she said so full of sorrow that it struck Hieronymus like a blow.

  Then Dolores jammed the envelope down the front of his pants and waved him away as if he were a fly. The next thing he knew he was airborne, the night air freezing his face as he plummeted toward the streets of Granada.

  * * *

  Broken bodies.

  Mounds of broken bodies piled in the streets, heaped in communal graves, quicklime coating heads and limbs like snow on the peaks of the sierras, most eyes were closed but some were open, staring in silent accusation. They visited Hieronymus in his darkest dreams, these insatiable dead, never speaking. Their memory came to him unbidden as he rushed down to meet them in the black hole they called their forever home.

  “Brothers and sisters,” Hieronymus whispered, eyes shut tight as he hurtled downwards, and his breath was smoke.

  He heard a pop and felt a jerk on his shoulders, righting him in midair as his headlong descent transformed into a glide. Stunned, he looked up to see a rectangle of silk spread out above him, connected by taut lines tethered to his back. No sooner had he realized that his hands were free when a tower loomed before him, growing larger by the second. Panicked, Hieronymus jerked on the cords and the parachute veered him to the right and he passed the tower unscathed. Flagpoles and radio antennas on rooftops snatched at his feet as he sped past. Hieronymus heard the engine in his chest whirring as the blood thrummed in his ears, and he prayed that its tiny pistons held out.

  Hieronymus glided over the empty streets of the Albaicín, a ghost town in the predawn darkness. He gathered the lines in his fists and jerked, arresting his flight. He drifted in a lazy spiral into the abandoned Plaza del Triunfo, perfectly silent except for the whine emerging through the metal teeth of his chest zipper. Hieronymus’s feet touched down and he collapsed, buckling under the weight of memory and despair, his cheek resting on the stones that had tasted so much Andalusian blood.